From your flashes of inspiration at 2:00 AM to the list of funny things your children say, or that brilliant idea you had in the conference room, andyour ever-growing list of household chores—OneNote holds the notes to your lifeto track all the things you need to keep in mind, but simply don’t have room for in your overworked brain.

We enjoy the privilege of serving millions of customers like you, who each have unique needs and who use OneNote in unique ways. Over the past year, we’ve been listening to your passionate feedback and are humbled by your consistent love for OneNote. We hear you loud and clear — you want to keep your notes your way!

With that in mind, we’re pleased to announce that we arecontinuing mainstream support for OneNote 2016 beyond October 2020, so that you can continue using the version of OneNote that works best for you. New support dates for OneNote 2016 now align with Office 2019 (October 10, 2023 for mainstream support and October 14, 2025 for extended support). We also want to make deployment and installation easier for organizations and individuals, so for Windows users, starting in March 2020, when you deploy or install Office 365 subscriptions that include the Office desktop apps or Office 2019, the OneNote desktop app will be installed by default alongside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.If you’d like to install OneNote 2016 earlier, you can get it here: aka.ms/InstallOneNote.

And, of course, OneNote should look the way you want it to. That’s why this week we are rolling out Dark Mode for OneNote 2016. This will be available for Office 365 subscribers and non-volume licensing Office 2019 customers. Dark Mode changes the app’s interface elements from light to dark. Using OneNote in this mode can improve readability in low light environments, increase legibility of the user interface as well as your notes, provide better contrast, and reduce eye strain. You might also use OneNote in Dark Mode simply as a personal preference. The choice is yours!

We’re excited about today’s announcements and we’ll keep listening to your feedback to make your OneNote better and better! Please continue requesting features and telling us what you think via the in-app feedback.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! We diehards have ranted in a separate blog for 18 months about the loud of the desktop version, often feeling despair that nobody was listening! You have renewed our faith in the Customer Feedback process!!!

It would ALSO be really great to have a specific name attached to the title of OneNote PM so we know who we are working with here! William Devereux will tell you that we are generally a well behaved, but ardent, group of supporters!!!

Thank you - I know it's not easy for a big company to admit it was wrong and reverse course, and even more difficult to resurrect products considered "dead" in internal discussions. So thank you very much for listening to users, and admitting that this is an essential product that is needed by all office users. We users and resellers appreciate it!

Will OneNote 2016 start receiving feature updates again, or is this just to announce that it will get security and bug-fixes through 2023/2025?

When you say 'OneNote desktop will get installed alongside Office 365 and Office 2019' are you talking about OneNote 2016 or OneNote UWP?

What's the future for OneNote UWP? Will it continue to be developed, or will development stop to focus on improving OneNote 2016?

Have some die-hard OneNote 2016 users in my org and their biggest complaint about switching to UWP was shared notebook sync times that sometimes took days, making collaboration nearly impossible. Will be happy to switch them back to OneNote 2016, just want to know how that 'switch' process will look like using Intune.

What does that mean for the UWP app? Is it going to be developed further? I really like it because of the low input latency, it's such a shame, that in many places it's so limited, like I can't export a page neither in native .one format nor in PDF or in anything that's usable...

Thank you! This is amazing news! So glad you're showing that you're listening to the community, it means more than you can imagine. After all we're basically just helpless victims to whatever you decide, you have all the power...but the feeling of then being heard is invaluable!

Now on to the next: Let the Mac version get the following: "Leaving (or option to leave) the section tabs at the top on the page instead of on the side". So many of my students just gave up on OneNote after this change. Don't let us down! ;)

Thank you Microsoft for listening to your customers! It's perfectly okay to have two similar apps that solve similar problems. But there is a clear and wide gap between Win10 OneNote and Office OneNote that I am not sure will ever be resolved, but definitely not before 2020, so this is a great decision. Please keep adding features to Desktop OneNote.

This is just excellent news, well done MS. Desktop Onenote is widely regarded as the high watermark for note taking apps, and it was a shame to see so many resources go into rebuilding toward feature parity in the UWP version. Thanks for listening to feedback! I'm looking forward to new features in Onenote desktop over time.

Thank You Microsoft! OneNote 2016 hasn't had new features for years, yet remains unsurpassed by OneNote web app and certainly OneNote modern app. Please make this the first step to complete resurrection! Now that Edge will be based on Chromium, WIN32 API is no longer deprecated and needs to remain. Hence, OneNote desktop app can remain, too!

Thank goodness!! Using the app feels like trying to draw a rainbow with an etch-a-sketch.

I do wish it was not only getting continued support but also concerted development as well though, it could be so much better with a few basics improved (like good language control for anyone not in the states!) .. and then some fancier ones; can you imagine if you could have embedded code items like you can in sharepoint?? Would be epic.

I have invested too much time in learning the current OneNote (whatever it's real name is). I have even reset my main desktop computer, to clean up Windows and Office and everything else. So for me this announcement means less support of OneNote in favor of OneNote 2016. But OK.

@jtfox76 the problem with Modern OneNote goes beyond feature parity. It has the worst UI in the world for a PC. It is great for a phone, but for a 27" monitor it is a horrible horrible waste of space, and virtually impossible to efficiently drag notes and sections from one section to another, or one notebook to another, all of which is incredibly easy with the classic OneNote UI.

I know the goal was to have a consistent UI across platforms, but that only works so far. Having 3 panes of data (left, top, right) on an iphone is a mess because of the screen size. But having that on a PC is a joy to work with given its large screen. Look at Excel/Word/PowerPoint. Those have different UIs than do the phone/tablet versions, because the desktop UI on a phone would be horrible, and the phone UI on the desktop for Excel would cause a riot. Right tool for the right job. And "Modern OneNote" is not the right tool for someone that has been using it over a decade and cannot get a darn thing done with the new version.

@Ed Hansberry, very well said. I was a PM on PowerPoint for 17 years and poorly thought through initiatives (like blindly consistent UI across very divergent platforms) were the bane of my existence in later years. This is a prime example of just how bad they can get. I take a little solace in this reversal, but continue to worry about designers trying to "make a splash" in the Office team who don't get or actually care about users.

Great news that 2016 isn't being dumped, but that wasn't my overall concern; it's that we have two OneNote apps within mainstream support and neither of them are perfect for all users. I've just run through a survey process with staff and most don't have a technical reason why the desktop app is better than the UWP version; it simply boils down to what they're accustomed to. In an enterprise, I need to know what commitments Microsoft has longer term. Do we install the 2016 app for users again? Does it hang around under the 2019 name or get its version stripped (like the 2019 applications) so it can be amply confused with the UWP app? To be honest I would've been far happier with an all-out commitment to implement much requested features as a solid rate, then kill the Win32 version as planned. There are many reasons why I'd still prefer to mandate UWP over 2016...

There are many, many functional reason why the desktop version is better. Technically, it allows you to save locally as well as in the cloud which is a requirement for many. Have you used the UWP version as a user? It is a pale imitation of the desktop version. The desktop version must stay along with desktop Word, Excel etc - at least until such time as the UWP versions mirror all functionality - which is a long way off. I am a technical engineer and I find the UWP version of onenote, and in fact all the office apps, almost unusable for my day to day purposes.

Thank you , thank you, thank you. My small business thanks you as we keep all documents related to a project in a notebook where we can scroll through them easily. Teams is a good collaboration tool but it is not anyway near friendly for storing documents for posterity in a way that is easy to reach. With teams there are too many steps to go through especially on a phone to find the piece needed. With Onenote all of the needed information can be organized and reached in a click or two.